Thursday, May 2, 2024
4:15 a.m. So, to continue. Not sure how to proceed.
Relax the reins; let us worry about exposition. Remember, you can always shuffle the resulting passages if need be.
Let’s talk about choice as it can and cannot be manifested in 3D life. You will remember, we have said that providing the possibility of choice is the very reason for the existence of 3D conditions. By forcing your consciousness to concentrate on one time and space, 3D conditions provide the ability and the de facto necessity of choice. But what does it really mean, to choose? If human life were the relatively unitary, relatively separated thing it appears to be, choice would be nearly impossible, for it would involve changing the result of so many conditions that brought you to where you were.
But you are not what you appear to be, and therefore neither is choice. Because you are not the solitary individual units you appear to be, change involves not change of what you are, but change of emphasis among the many strands that you comprise. It is easier to change relative emphasis than it would be to bring in new elements.
This isn’t coming our clearly yet.
No. We see we will have to move to a more remote starting-point. Leet’s look at what a soul is, and which ways it can be considered to be continuing from a prior point and which ways it can be considered new in each incarnation. That will show how it is that choice represents a choosing among elements rather than an introduction of new elements. It will also show how different theological tenets arose from people seeing one but not other aspects of the human condition.
To do this, we will need to make certain flat statements of fact that the reader will have to accept or reject or hold in suspension, depending entirely upon whether the statements resonate. We remind people, there’s nothing wrong with accepting an idea provisionally and then later changing your mind if need be. Exposition is our part; judgment is the reader’s part.
So:
Into the making of a 3D human, many things contribute. The physical heredity has its analogue in what we may call the spiritual heredity. The two shed light upon each other and (as we shall show sooner or later) interpenetrate.
A 3D being created via sexual reproduction is necessarily a compound being, not a unitary one. This should be evident. One’s father’s line provides certain characteristics; one’s mother’s line provides certain characteristics. The resulting child is a compound of the two lines, every child different not only because of circumstances including time and place, but primarily because the possibilities for inheritance from both lines are so numerous, no two people (other than identical twins) are likely to share them all. And this is true all the way back along each parent’s line, and all the way forward along the lines contributed to by each descendant.
Thus, physically you contain characteristics taken from each of two lines, each of which lines is composed of countless individuals who were equally composed. In short, you are the latest in a long series of mixtures, a very complex result that can be considered individual only in that you each live in separate bodies.
This is so, physically. It is equally so spiritually. When the spiritual (the non-3D) elements came together in the new baby, they too were the result of mixtures going back to the beginning of human life. (And farther, but we will not concern ourselves with that at this time. The exposition is complicated enough as it is!)
Some people believe in reincarnation, the return to 3D of souls that have lived there before. Others believe that each new body receives (or contains, let’s say) a new soul. Both are correct as far as they go, and neither goes far enough, because each considers the 3D human is if it were a unit, when in fact it is a compound.
Reincarnation is valid, in that the same elements live again. It is not valid, in that it is not the case of one unit dying to 3D and being reborn to 3D. If you were units, it would have to be one way or the other: Either the unit came back or it did not. Thus, reincarnation would be true or it would not.
Individual souls being created for each 3D incarnation, similarly, is valid and not valid, depending on how you look at it. When you see that each new soul is a combination of souls that have lived before, you see that yes it is new, in that that particular combination never existed together before, and no it is not new, in that the elements that comprise it are not new. As in so many things, it is all in what factors you include as you consider the matter.
So we propose this scheme, which is somewhat simplified but is accurate enough to be going on with.
- The human body is a compound, not a unit. It may be said to be a collection of characteristics that have to learn to live together. This is true physically and also spiritually.
- Physically, the characteristics from either line are so manifold that there is little possibility they will all mesh smoothly. In greater or lesser degree, what one piece needs, another piece may suffer from. Hence, illness, incapacity. Hence also, certain remarkable seemingly superhuman abilities.
- Spiritually, the same. You are composed of many strands of – shall we call it non-3D DNA? If several different combinations of previous lives go into the making of a new 3D consciousness, you may expect conflict, cooperation, and overlap among them, just as in the inherited physical characteristics.
- In a sense, it could be said that both body and soul enter this life with unfinished business. By this we mean, not a conscious agenda, but a vector arising out of what the elements in combination create. Your life is a drama, you might say, and both in physical and spiritual terms, it involves the conflict and cooperation of elements that have come from different places, have different needs, have different aptitudes.
Does this clarify our description of life as choice? You know this by your experience. You live the conflict and cooperation of your constituent elements every moment. You choose among available options, all of which are equally you. It isn’t a matter of changing what you are, it is closer to changing the order of precedence of your various constituent elements.
You may ask, “Why?” Why is life this way? Life is often painful, or boring, or liberating, or ecstatically joyful – or any other possible state of being – but does it mean anything more than the passing of time?
Recognize that some questions cannot be answered too soon, or they get falsified by lack of context. But keep the question in mind; it will give point to further exposition. For now, consider the idea that you are not a unit in any sense but as a separate body. Your physical and nonphysical composition is a combination; your mental life is not separate –
In fact, that is where we should resume, with the fact that your mental life connects you, even as your physical life separates you. This should follow logically from the fact that the mental functions in non-3D; you would expect it to follow different rules and exhibit different characteristics. However, the idea may not be obvious until stated. We will go into it next time, probably.
Wonderful. Our thanks, today, as always.